Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Planio Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Planio provides formulas that can query Planio data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Planio data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following:

=CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the Planio data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as APIConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Planio data, separated by semicolons.

  Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Planio Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Planio.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Planio (see below).

  Planio API Profile Settings

  Enable the REST API in Planio Administration Settings, then go to My Account > API Access Key and click Show to reveal your API key. Your subdomain is the prefix of your Planio account URL.

• ResultLocation: The cell that the output of results should start from.

Pass Spreadsheet Cells as Inputs to the Query

The procedure below results in a spreadsheet that organizes all the formula inputs in the first column.

1. Define cells for the formula inputs. In addition to the connection inputs, add another input to define a criterion for a filter to be used to search Planio data, such as Country.
2. In another cell, write the formula, referencing the cell values from the user input cells defined above. Single quotes are used to enclose values such as addresses that may contain spaces.

=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Companies WHERE Country = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";Subdomain="&B3&";Provider=API",B6)

👁 Formula inputs used in this example. (Google Apps is shown.)

3. Change the filter to change the data. 👁 The outputs of the formula. (Google Apps is shown.)